The 11 Hottest Pre-IPO Enterprise Startups

Here are the companies in the enterprise tech space that have investors excited for their initial public offerings.

By Kyle Russell

1 COMMENTS

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie.

IMAGE: Getty Images

Advertisement

If you asked your average techies what they think of enterprise tech, you're likely to get a dismissive yawn.

The same can't be said for investors.

Venture capitalists and Wall Street alike have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years into companies making the next generation of hardware and software powering our cloud-based future.

From storage makers that will let you run any application from any device to open-source companies powering the big data revolution, these are the companies that have everyone--Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike--excited for their initial public offerings.

In addition to funding, Box made four acquisitions in 2013 and now claims over 20 million users.

MongoDB: Open-source databases bring in millions.

Sharing a co-founder with this very site, MongoDB provides software and support in one of the most important areas of enterprise tech: databases.

Since changing to an open-source business model in 2009, the site has become a go-to technology for companies that need powerful, scalable technologies, like Foursquare, Craigslist and The New York Times.

The company has raised approximately $223 million in funding since its inception, $150 million of which it brought in during a massive funding round late last year that brought its valuation to roughly $1.2 billion.

Dropbox: A storage company going mainstream.

Dropbox has had a wildly successful run over over the last several years.

Atlassian: Helping IT pros work together.

Atlassian offers tools that help enterprise developers track and manage software projects. Comparatively speaking, the company hasn't raised a lot of venture funds--$60 million in 2010 from one VC, Accel Partners.

That's because it's profitable. And because it has a unique business model where it doesn't use any sales people. It makes the sales process so easy that customers simply sign up via its website.

Many insiders think it will go public in 2014.

GitHub: The place for open-source development projects.

GitHub offers software and a cloud service for hosting and collaborating on open-source software projects.

GitHub's founders famously bootstrapped the company into a profitable business and then shocked the tech world by accepting a $100 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz in 2012--a record for the biggest one-VC software investment at the time.

Cloudera: Powering the big data revolution.

Founded by engineers from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook Cloudera is one of the most watched big data startups in the Valley.

It's the company that develops and distributes Hadoop, the open-source software that powers the data processing engines of the world’s largest and most popular websites.

Last June, the company tapped Tom Reilly to serve as CEO. Reilly has experience taking companies public -; he previously served as chief executive at ArcSight, an Internet security company, when it went public and then went on to be acquired by HP for $1.5 billion, a 24% premium.

Pure Storage: Designing storage based on today's technology.

Pure Storage makes storage for companies that need to move lots of data very quickly, focusing solely on flash-based storage.

AppDynamics: Helping companies make their apps better.

AppDynamics makes an app-monitoring tool that lets companies see how people are using their apps once they download them.

While that doesn't sound like the most exciting technology, it's quickly becoming a must-have tool for every enterprise. The company doubled its growth in the first half of 2013, it says, and is nearing $100 million in revenue, reports Businessweek. It's testing the waters for an IPO soon.